This is What Happens When Kids Leave Traditional Education

The homeschooling movement is a radical alternative which is continuing to grow in popularity. Because schools only offer one type of curriculum and may not cater to each students’ unique learning needs, developing a new type of education offers many benefits.

Not only do parents have an active role in the type of information being taught, but meaningful relationships can be formed with children, access to nourishing, wholesomely prepared food is available (which has been proven to improve behavior and raise IQ), and negative influences that commonly permeate mainstream education can be eliminated.

This is not to say there are no potential drawbacks of homeschooling (it can be quite difficult trying to pass off education as ‘exciting’ to certain young adults), but the opportunity to shape a child’s education based on their particular interests and aptitudes may accelerate their learning development and long-term success in life.

One example of a student who claims to be thriving as a homeschooled student is Logan Laplante. After leaving traditional education at age 9, he feels he was given the opportunity to create the type of life all kids want, “to be happy and healthy”. Now 13-years-old, he shared at a recent TEDx event how hack-schooling (as he calls it) is allowing him to make his vision possible.

Logan has the opportunity to tailor his education to his interests and his style of learning, but students subject to standard teaching methods and mainstream curriculum do not have this option. Perhaps it’s due to this reason that studies confirm home schooled children outperform their peers from both private and public schools.

Source: TEDx

Less conditioned to think within the confines of a crumbling system, home schooled children are much more likely to grow into a creative, adaptive, and forward thinking adults because of their schooling environment which encouraged such growth.

Logan’s story is similar to Jacob Barnett’s: placed in special-ed because of autism, he is now a 15-year-old theoretical physicist in line to win the Nobel Prize. With an IQ higher than Einstein’s, it was not his intelligence that needed to be questioned, but the method of best communicating with him and supporting his individual learning needs.

With different epigenetics, motivations, and biochemistries, all children learn in a way unique to them. To allow the youth of today to excel in their own development and contribute to society innovatively in the future, more open-minded curriculum and varied learning methods need to be adopted into mainstream schooling.

Public and private schools need not be condemned, but only allowed the opportunity to adopt change. There are many ways traditional schooling could be improved, but until it is fixed, homeschooling remains a solid and hopeful option for allowing kids to “grow up happy and healthy”.